Today, a poem for your consideration. It’s a quite famous one by Galway Kinnell.
It combines some of my favorite things: autumn, language, and blackberries. What experiences are essential to really make your autumn? What words are delighting you as you head into this season?
Blackberry Eating
Galway Kinnell (1927 – 2014)
I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.
Like some of the sayings, not specific words, of the Lord Jesus in the Gospel of John chapters 7-8. Sharp, tart, sweet and stringent words for these late weeks of morning prayer in ordinary time. And just as rounded and elegant as the poem.